Your First 90 Days as a Safety Manager: What to Actually Do

The safety manager who came before you either left on good terms or got pushed out. Either way, there are things nobody told them in their first week. And there are things nobody will tell you either, unless you ask the right people.

The first 90 days aren’t about fixing the site. They’re about learning it.

The First Week: Don’t Announce Anything

Most new safety managers come in with an agenda. They’ve read about behavioral-based safety, or they saw something on the job tour that already bothers them, or their last site did things differently and it worked. That impulse to improve is the right instinct applied too early.

In your first week, your job is to listen. Not to supervisors and not to management. Go to the workers.

Walk every work area. Ask what the most hazardous tasks are. Ask where people have gotten hurt before, even if it wasn’t recorded. Ask what safety rules get ignored and why. You’ll get better hazard intelligence from one honest conversation with a forklift operator than from three hours reviewing the written program.

You also need to go online before your first day is over. Use the OSHA establishment search tool to pull your site’s inspection history. Every OSHA inspection, every citation, every violation is a public record. Look at what was cited, when, and whether the abatement was actually completed. A site with repeat violations on electrical hazards is telling you something. A site that’s never had an inspection despite 15 years of operation is also telling you something.

Request the OSHA 300 log for the last three years on day one. That’s the injury and illness record required under 29 CFR 1904. The OSHA 300 shows you not just what’s been recorded, but what kinds of injuries keep recurring. Repetitive strains from the same operation. Lacerations from the same machine. Sprains from the same area of the floor. Patterns in the 300 log tell you where the real exposure is.

Ask management one specific question: who has the authority to stop work at this site? And then ask separately, do they actually use it? The gap between those two answers tells you more about safety culture than any policy document.

Learning the Hazards: Your Real Job for the First 30 Days

You’re not a policy writer for the first month. You’re a hazard investigator.

Get out of the office. Walk with workers during their actual tasks, not during a staged tour. Watch how materials get moved. Watch how equipment gets maintained. Watch what happens when there’s a production push and someone needs to cut a corner. That’s where the real exposures are.

Four things to pull in the first two weeks:

The OSHA 300 log and 301 incident reports for at least three years, as mentioned above. The written safety programs. Existing job hazard analyses. And the maintenance work order log if you can get access to it. Deferred maintenance is a leading indicator. A site that consistently pushes preventive maintenance to next quarter is a site that runs equipment past its safe operating condition.

Talk to the industrial hygienist if there is one. If there isn’t, that’s a gap to note. Exposure to chemical hazards, noise, heat, and silica dust doesn’t always produce visible injuries immediately, but it shows up in long-term health outcomes and eventually in workers’ comp costs.

If your site has contractors, understand the contractor management process before you touch it. Contractor safety is one of the most cited problem areas in multiemployer worksites. OSHA’s multi-employer citation policy means you can be cited as a controlling employer for hazards your own workers didn’t create.

Building Credibility: The Fast Track

Here’s what doesn’t build credibility: a new safety orientation PowerPoint, a revised policy binder, or a speech about the importance of safety at an all-hands meeting.

Here’s what does: fixing something visible, fast.

In your first two weeks, find two or three specific hazards that are clearly wrong, clearly fixable, and clearly visible to workers. A burned-out emergency exit light. A machine with a missing guard. A spill kit that’s empty. A fire extinguisher that’s three years past inspection. Fix them. Put a note on each one explaining what changed. Workers will notice.

This matters because your credibility with workers is built on one question: does this person actually fix things, or do they just write reports? You prove the answer by acting, not by talking.

Be in the field more than you’re in your office, especially in the first 30 days. If workers only see you when something’s wrong or when there’s an audit, you become associated with enforcement and punishment. If they see you regularly, asking questions and solving small problems, you become someone they’ll bring real concerns to.

The safety manager role is fundamentally about information flow. Hazard information has to reach you. That only happens if workers trust that bringing problems to you makes things better, not worse.

The Politics: Find Your Allies Before You Need Them

Every facility has informal power. There’s a maintenance supervisor everyone respects. There’s a floor worker who’s been there 20 years and whose opinion influences the crew. There’s probably a middle manager who actually cares about safety and one who sees it purely as a compliance tax.

Identify these people in your first 30 days. Don’t try to change anything yet. Just build relationships.

Lunch with the maintenance department matters more than most safety managers realize. Maintenance controls hazardous energy lockout, equipment condition, and the speed of corrective action. If maintenance sees you as a partner instead of an auditor, work orders get done. If they see you as an adversary, abatement timelines stretch.

The same logic applies to line supervisors. A supervisor who believes in safety doesn’t just follow the rules. They reinforce them with their crew. Win two or three supervisors early, and you have a force multiplier. Alienate them with enforcement actions before you’ve built the relationship, and you’ll spend the rest of your tenure fighting friction.

Don’t skip the honest realities of the safety manager role when you’re doing this political mapping. Some workplaces have cultures that will resist safety regardless of your approach. It’s better to understand that early than to interpret it as your failure.

The 30-60-90 Framework

Breaking down the first 90 days into phases gives you structure without locking you into a rigid plan.

Days 1 to 30: Learn

Your output at 30 days should be a written hazard inventory, not a corrective action plan. You need a realistic picture of the actual risk profile before you start prioritizing. The written hazard inventory should cover the top exposures by severity and frequency, the gaps between what the written programs say and what actually happens in the field, and the two or three areas where injury risk is highest.

Fix small visible problems as you find them. Don’t wait for the 30-day review.

Days 31 to 60: Prioritize

By day 60, you need a risk-ranked corrective action list. Not 40 items with no priority. A short list of the most significant hazards, with specific abatement actions, responsible parties, and deadlines.

This is also when you start building relationships with management around resource allocation. If fixing your top hazard requires a $20,000 equipment modification, that conversation needs to start now. Management buys in when they understand the cost of the hazard, including the OSHA penalty exposure, the workers’ comp cost, and the liability. Numbers matter in that conversation more than safety principles.

Days 61 to 90: Begin Systematic Improvements

At 90 days, you should be implementing, not still planning. The first corrective actions should be in progress. Workers should be seeing visible changes. Supervisors should know what you’re working on.

You should also be starting to establish or revise the near miss reporting process. Near miss data is the leading indicator that everything else depends on. If workers are reporting near misses, you’re getting real hazard intelligence. If no near misses are being reported, the reports aren’t matching reality.

What to Absolutely Avoid in the First 90 Days

Don’t issue a flurry of new policies or procedural changes in month one. Workers tune out policy changes from new managers because they’ve seen it before. New manager arrives, issues a bunch of memos, nothing actually changes. Wait until you understand the operation before you change any written program.

Don’t make promises you can’t keep. If a worker tells you the forklift needs new brakes and you say you’ll get it fixed, get it fixed. One broken promise in the first month costs you credibility that takes six months to rebuild.

Don’t conduct a punitive sweep. Walking the facility with a clipboard looking for violations to document sends the wrong message in month one. You’re still in the trust-building phase. Save formal enforcement for after you’ve built the culture that makes enforcement less necessary.

Don’t ignore production pressure. Safety decisions happen in real time, often under pressure to keep production moving. If you don’t understand production well enough to have a realistic conversation about it, you’ll make safety calls that make sense on paper but create adversarial pressure in practice.

And don’t try to do everything alone. The safety career path is long, and the best safety managers build systems and relationships that extend their reach. You can’t personally observe every task on every shift. Build the supervisor and worker relationships that give you eyes and ears throughout the operation.

The 90-day mark isn’t a finish line. It’s the point where you stop being new. Workers have formed an opinion of you. Supervisors have decided whether you’re useful or just overhead. Management has seen whether you fix things or just document them.

The goal by day 90 is that the answer to each of those questions is the right one.